Comments on: Besiege Your Web Application – Load Testing over HTTP

By: Developer4lease

Developer4lease — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 06:01:29 +0000

Thank you for sharing useful information.I’m not that familiar with Apache Flood, but at a glance it seems that Siege is geared towards emulating real users hitting your website, with delays between hits and a calculated actual-concurrency in the statistics.We want you to come up with more information.

http://www.developer4lease.com/

By: Paul Annesley

Paul Annesley — Thu, 10 May 2007 00:52:18 +0000

Siege test cases (URL files) can be automatically built from your browser by browsing through Sproxy, also from JoeDog.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 09 May 2007 23:29:19 +0000

Personally, I use Apache JMeter (http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/) Which has a Java focus but also is excellent for load testing all (brands of) websites.

The thing I like most about it is, you can have it read your browser requests and it’ll automatically build a config script for you. This allows you to simply create a script by browsing the website in a normal browser and it’ll record your every move (no spyware attached). Not sure if Siege does this but OpenSTA does.

Oh, and as it’s written in Java, it’s cross platform. It’s also GUI based (albeit ugly).

By: Paul Annesley

Paul Annesley — Wed, 09 May 2007 05:58:37 +0000

Apache Bench (ab) is more of a raw-speed benchmarking tool.

Siege lets you build test cases (see the URLs File I mentioned) which try to simulate large numbers of real users browsing your site – with a list of GET and POST requests, including POST data. Rather than each concurrent user flooding the server, it inserts delays between requests for a more true-to-life effect.

I would recommend you read the Siege History page for a rationale of why it was developed when there were similar tools like Apache Bench out there.

By: Karl

Karl — Tue, 08 May 2007 13:36:55 +0000

Looks the same as Apache Bench to me.

By: simran

simran — Tue, 08 May 2007 07:14:27 +0000

Nice find!

By: andrew.k

andrew.k — Tue, 08 May 2007 04:23:25 +0000

For any Windows users feeling left out, have a look at OpenSTA. Also free, but uses a Windows GUI and can use IE or Firefox to initially create the tests (just hit record and start surfing). Another handy feature is having multiple machines in a network run tests, all reporting back to a central machine for compiling the results.

By: Paul Annesley

Paul Annesley — Mon, 07 May 2007 10:11:05 +0000

mrsmiley: by the looks of it, the two tools cover fairly similar ground.

Personally, I prefer a tool which takes plaintext input files (or just a couple of command line parameters) rather than the XML which Apache Flood seems to require, but that’s personal preference. And perhaps Flood provides the same interface.

I’m not that familiar with Apache Flood, but at a glance it seems that Siege is geared towards emulating real users hitting your website, with delays between hits and a calculated actual-concurrency in the statistics.

Thanks for pointing it out.

By: mrsmiley

mrsmiley — Mon, 07 May 2007 06:35:09 +0000

How does it differ from the Apache flood tool? http://httpd.apache.org/test/flood/

From my memories of playing with it a few years back, it essentially does the same thing and its been part of Apache for eons.

By: Matthew Magain

Matthew Magain — Mon, 07 May 2007 06:15:28 +0000

That is definitely pretty cool. The last time I used a tool like this was Mercury LoadRunner, which costs tens of thousands of bucks.